


words like tomorrow (or future, or fate)

by crossingwinter



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: (I do this because Your name. is the best goddamn story.), (I swore that I would never write a High School AU, Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Your name., F/M, which just goes to show never promise anything)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-29
Updated: 2019-03-05
Packaged: 2019-10-19 02:07:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 15,812
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17592638
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crossingwinter/pseuds/crossingwinter
Summary: One day, Rey wakes in a body that's not her own in a town she's never been to before.  Who is Ben, whose body she seems to be possessing, and who woke up inherbody?  Why are they connected this way?---AYour name.AU.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [haloren1st](https://archiveofourown.org/users/haloren1st/gifts), [SynthSea](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SynthSea/gifts).



> _Your name._ destroyed my life last year and it’s honestly one of the best movies/stories I have encountered in a long while. If you haven’t seen it, I can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s stunningly beautiful and you feel literally every single emotion while watching it. I’m jacking most of the plot trajectory of this thing directly from the film, so if you aren’t the type for spoilers, go watch it and then come back to this. I promise I won’t be upset that you went and watched a great movie rather than reading my dumb fanfic.
> 
> Secondly— _Your name._ very much leans on/into some Japanese mythology that I—an American—didn’t feel comfortable directly writing because 1) I didn’t want to do it wrong (and I’m quite sure that I would have) and 2) I’m writing about non-Japanese characters in not-Japan. I hope very much that the choices I made—specifically to replace some of that mythology with Force analogies in this here _Star Wars_ fanfiction—will not offend or upset. My choice was to consciously replace rather than bastardize and it felt like being caught between a rock and a hard place and I will happily talk/listen about what worked/didn’t work. 
> 
> Thanks eternally to my _Star Wars_ Lore guru aionimica for helping me sort out some Force things. This one is dedicated to haloren1st, who was talking about this on twitter and made me actually think about it long enough to write, and to synthsea, who sat in the theater with me a little over a year ago and watched my face with a look of glee when my heart was ripped out of my chest. The title of this fic comes from [the English version of one of the songs from the movie](https://genius.com/Radwimps-sparkle-english-version-lyrics).
> 
> Lastly—a moment of shameless self promo—I wrote [this _Your name._ short fic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10580463) on my way home from seeing it because I was Full of Feelings. Just gonna…put that out there ;-)

_Once in a while when I wake up. I find myself crying._

_I don’t know why._

_A dream I had, but can never recall, perhaps._

_It feels sometimes like I lost something. Something big, or important._

_But I can’t remember what. And it lingers for a long time after I wake up._

❖

Ben’s alarm goes off. He sits up and rubs his eyes and stares out of the window.

There’s something about Coruscant in the pre-dawn light, that waking moment between day and night. The lights in the buildings seem dimmer, and it’s almost as though the city is asleep.

He stretches his arms over his head, his back crackling like the trees back home. He rubs his hands over his face. Tears.

So that’s why he’s feeling horrible this morning.

He swallows and takes a deep breath before making himself get out of bed. Today is going to be one of those days.

❖

Rey stares out of the window of the subway car as it takes her to work. Her gaze isn’t focused today. She can’t let it be focused today. If she focuses, she’ll feel like she’s looking for something, and the tears will come back. So she lets her eyes glaze over and tries not to look in the windows of the other subway cars that they stand opposite in at various stations through the city. She’s not looking for a face. She doesn’t know what she’s looking for. It’s like she lost something, but she doesn’t know what.

She takes a deep breath and rubs her wrist, a habit she’d picked up years ago, before she’d lost her bracelet.

Her eyes sting, her lip quivers, and when she looks down at her shoes, she sees a spot of water land on her toe. Her shoulders shake and she cries quietly.

Whatever it is, it’s not coming back—just like her parents.

It’s been like this since the day the stars fell. She’d never seen lights in the skies like that before. The city lights of Coruscant don’t really allow for stars, but the comet had been bright enough to rip the sky open with deep purples, cyans, blues, and bright brilliant stars. She’d never seen anything so beautiful, had known that she never would again. The comet’s orbit was twelve-hundred years. She’d be long-past decomposed by the time it rounded the world again. So she was going to drink in that brilliant sky for as long as she could.

And then the comet had split, right at the nucleus, and Rey hadn’t understood why but it had felt like her heart was breaking too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Planning the next update for Friday. The whole fic is complete, and the posting schedule is ~whimsical/bi-weeklyish.


	2. Chapter 1

The alarm goes off and she fumbles without opening her eyes. She’s going to be late, if her room is this bright already. Did she mess up her alarm?

Unkar will be mad at her. She has four lates this month on her record already and if she gets six, she’ll get a dressing down and detention that will probably cut into the hours she works at the restaurant. Which he wouldn’t care about, she’s sure, except that she only gets to keep her tip money. Her wages go to him. _Food and drink,_ he insists. The cost of living in a nice apartment. If you can call this a nice apartment.

She takes a deep breath and—

The room is bright, the window is slightly open and there’s a fresh breeze. There’s a rustling of leaves.

 _Ok, a dream then,_ Rey thinks. But she pinches herself just to be sure, and frowns because that does hurt.

She climbs out of the bed and freezes. Something’s different. Something’s not right. Something’s sticking right out of her hips and is very not right.

Her face heats as she stares at it and then she jerks her head up and stares right at the ceiling and her hands scrabble across a chest that is muscular but has no breasts on it—not that Rey has substantial breasts or anything, but she does have breasts. She does have them. She has mammary glands and no—no—

_What the hell is going on?_

❖

Ben fumbles for his alarm when he wakes up. He lies there with his eyes closed for a long time. He sets his alarm early for just this moment. So he can lie there and listen to the trees and pretend that everything is the way it was.

_Idiot._

Dad’s not gonna come bang on his door and tell him his breakfast is gonna get cold. His mom isn’t going to poke her head in and ask if he slept ok, eliciting an annoyed _mom let me get dressed_. He just lies there, and swallows, and clenches his fist, and hates himself.

He gets up in the end. He always does. He tells himself it’s not because he’s weak, because he’s afraid of what would happen if he didn’t go to school—no matter how much he hates it. And oh, how he hates it.

He stumbles half-awake and fully dressed into the kitchen where he finds his uncle sitting at the table, reading the newspaper.

“There, that’s more like you,” Uncle Luke says with a smile, pushing a pot of caf towards Ben.

“Huh?”

“Didn’t cut yourself again this morning?”

Ben blinks at him, confused. Then he brushes his hand over his face. There’s a bandage on his cheek and as he presses it, he feels what can only be the cut of a razor. Like he’d messed up shaving like a thirteen-year-old. He frowns. He’s always careful with his razor for precisely this reason.

“Didn’t shave this morning,” he grunts. He doesn’t need to every day. Dad had once told him that he’d grow into it, like his old man, but that he should enjoy not having to. It makes a lump rise in his throat and he grabs one of the muffins that his uncle has set out. He grabs an orange, too, and stuffs it into his pocket to eat on the walk to school.

 _“—Organa’s reelection bid comes as no surprise for—_ ”

“Can we turn it off?” he asks his uncle without even looking at the television.

Instead, his uncle changes the channel.

 _“The Erso-Krennic comet will be coming into our orbit for the first time in twelve hundred years next month, and already, citizens of the Republic are planning viewings. Hotel prices have skyrocketed throughout—_ ”

“I’ll see you later,” Ben says.

“Be good,” his uncle calls after him and Ben feels his stomach curl with that usual shame.

 _I can’t be good, Uncle Luke,_ he thinks as he closes the front door behind him and goes down the steps.

He’s halfway around the lake when Chance finds him. “Hey! Wait up!”

Ben doesn’t stop, but that’s never once stopped Chance. He’s like dry rot. Can’t get rid of him. Even if his dad doesn’t want anything to do with Ben anymore. Like Chewie. Like his mom.

“I see you’re back to normal today,” Chance says with a grin, throwing his arm around Ben’s shoulder. Ben grunts. “Definitely back to normal,” Chance’s grin only widens. “Surly bastard.”

“What do you want?” Ben asks Chance.

“Can’t a friend just ask after a friend’s well-being? Especially after his uncle so clearly exorcised him.”

“What?” Ben asks, but it’s like something has unfogged in his brain. Uncle Luke had said something about him being back to normal too.

“Did it hurt?”

“Did what hurt?”

“Being exorcized. Clearly whatever nice, normal, friendly person invaded your body yesterday would have had a rough time letting go of you.”

“Shut up,” Ben grumbles.

“Suit yourself,” shrugs Chance.   Then, he calls, “Hey! Poe! He’s back to normal.”

Ben rolls his eyes as Poe—about fifty feet ahead of them turns and says, “Thank god! I was worried about you there, Solo.”

“Stuff it,” Ben mutters to both of them. He knows, somewhere deep down, that they’re trying to act like everything’s normal, like it’s not all his fault, like they don’t hate him the way the rest of the town does. But it doesn’t help much, really. At all, in fact. It just reminds him of everything that can’t be, and why it can’t be.

Poe and Chance jabber away as they make their way around the lake. It’s a brilliantly beautiful day—the end of summer. The sky is a bright blue, the waves on the lake glitter like diamonds, the leaves on the trees are a perfect late-summer green. Everything is idyllic.

Except that Ben’s there.

And, to make matters worse, they pass the power plant on their way to school. Ordinarily, Ben wouldn’t care. Except that his mother is there, talking into a microphone. “Takodana’s fiscal health needs revitalization. My team has been working tirelessly on it, but my opponent—” Ben picks up the pace and stares out over the lake, away from his mother.

It doesn’t work.

“Ben,” she says directly into the microphone and his head snaps around and he stares at her. Her brown eyes are staring right at him, and all he can think about is how his mom and dad used to argue about who had given him the brown eyes. His mom won the argument, by default he supposes. “Stand up straighter. You’ll ruin your back if you walk like that.”

He stands up taller—a good six inches above Poe and Chance—and squares his shoulders and keeps walking. Behind him, he hears someone mutter, “A good mother—especially after—”

“Poor woman, with a delinquent son like that.”

Ben wonders what would happen to his mother’s reelection bid if he snarled at one of the people at his mother’s campaign event. That she’s not a good mother, but it’s not her fault because he’s a terrible son.

School is school. People stare at Ben, but they always stare at Ben. He hates it, but he’d be a liar if he said he wasn’t used to it by now. His teachers mostly ignore him, which is a relief, until he’s in English literature class and he hears Mr. Durron say, “Mr. Solo,” and he looks up.

“Yeah?”

“Oh, you remember your own name now?”

People giggle behind their hands as Ben frowns.

“And why would twilight be symbolic in this scene between Bastila and Revan?” He can tell that Mr. Durron is throwing him a bone because he hasn’t read the book and wasn’t paying attention. But he’s not an idiot.

“Because it’s neither light nor dark. It’s both.”

“Very good,” Mr. Durron says and turns to the blackboard. “That in between moment when it’s neither light nor dark, night nor day, yet somehow both.   That time when the world blurs and everything becomes magical.” He circles something. “Liminality. Neither here-nor-there. A world between worlds.” Ben stops paying attention after that. Mr. Durron can go on and on for hours once he’s gotten on a tangent. Ben only had to tee the ball up for him to knock it out of the park. So he settles in his chair and stares out the window at the lake.

_Oh, you remember your own name now?_

He frowns and flicks the page of his notebook to the day before. Surely if something weird had happened, he’d have made a note of it for himself.

And sure enough, scrawled across the page of the notebook in very much _not_ his handwriting,

_WHO ARE YOU???_

Circled three times and underlined.

He stares at it.

And for the first time that day, wonders if maybe, in fact, his uncle really _did_ exorcise him last night.

❖

“Come on,” Uncle Luke calls to him when he gets home. “Holocrons.”

Ben groans. Today had been worse than he’d anticipated. So so much worse. People had been staring at him worse than ever and, after Lit class, Chance and Poe had told him that he had behaved weirdly in Art, in Gym, _and_ in Physics the day before. They seemed to be trying to let him know gently. It hadn’t worked. “Do I have to? It’s been a bad day.”

“All the more important to, then,” Luke says. “Maintain rhythm.”

“I’ve been maintaining rhythm,” Ben grumbles but he follows his uncle into the work room and sits down at the bench he hasn’t touched in four days. Uncle Luke doesn’t make him do dumb Force stuff on weekends. A blessing. _Did whoever invaded my body have to work on my holocron?_

He stares at the little device. It’s small. Very small. Uncle Luke told him he could make it bigger, if he liked, that it was normal for them to be about the size of his palm, but Ben had liked the idea of putting it on a necklace or a bracelet or something. If it was supposed to contain a part of his soul or whatever, he didn’t exactly want it to be something that anyone could just grab out of curiosity.   His uncle had understood that, at least.

He takes his tools in hand and begins to poke around at the dodecahedron, at the silver wiring around the memory crystal. Someone who wasn’t him had definitely touched it, all right. He is lucky they hadn’t completely broken the damn thing and set him back months worth of work. _WHO ARE YOU???_ written in his notebook at school, and his broken holocron.

He hates to admit it to himself, but he’s glad that his uncle made him do it. The pliers and screwdrivers in his hand, the focus, the familiarity—it’s more calming than he wants to admit. He hates admitting it, actually. Admitting that _anything_ to do with the Force is worth while makes him think of his dad, rolling his eyes and calling it all mumbo-jumbo and telling Luke to keep his paws off his son’s critical thinking. _More than just faith in the galaxy, ok? A brain to go with it_ , ruffling his son’s hair.

And now he’s sitting here, and making a holocron is the highlight of a particularly terrible day.

 _When I’m done here, I’m going to Coruscant,_ he tells himself. _I’m going to lose myself in the city. No one’s gonna know who I am, what I did. They won’t care. I’ll leave and never come back, and mom can have her stupid mayorship and Uncle Luke can have his stupid shrine and I can stop letting everyone down._

And maybe then, he won’t have to keep feeling the way he does. The way he will every time he thinks of his dad until the day he dies

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Holocron](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Holocron)  
> [Lando Calrissian, Jr. (AKA Chance)](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Lando_Calrissian,_Junior) is very much the wrong age, but I wanted him so he's here.


	3. Chapter 2

His alarm goes off when it’s still dark outside and he frowns without opening his eyes. _Why is it dark?_ Is this some trick of Uncle Luke’s to get him out of bed even earlier?

He reaches for his phone to turn the thing off, reaches and reaches until he falls right out of bed, landing on his side, a sharp pain shooting up him and his eyes jolting awake.

And one thing becomes very clear to him: he is not in his room.

Not even a little bit.

It’s a mess, this bedroom. There’s clothes—mostly school uniforms, but also underwear and…bras?—strewn everywhere. There are drawings taped to the walls and a vase full of dead flowers. Wait—bras?

And Ben looks down and sees them. They aren’t big. They’re actually pretty small. But they’re there, poking out of his chest and he can’t help but _feel_ them to believe that they’re—they’re real. They’re definitely real. And soft. And why does he have breasts and does he have—

Oh god, he’s turned into a girl. He’s a girl. What the ever-loving—

He hears a banging on the bedroom door, and a voice he doesn’t recognize: “Are you up? The state doesn’t pay me if you don’t go to school.”

“I’m up!”

And the voice is not exactly high-pitched, but it’s much higher than his. And definitely a girl’s voice. Oh god. He’s really a girl. He grabs his—her—phone and it unlocks under her thumbprint. There’s a text from someone named Finn, saying _I’m assuming you overslept because you’re not on the corner so I’ll see you at school. Hope you make it in time._

 _I’m on my way,_ is all Ben can think to text as he replies. Whoever this Finn is, he’ll help. Ben gets that vibe from that _Hope you make it in time_. He hopes he’s not wrong.

Ben dresses—or does his best to dress, how do bras even _work_?—doing his best not to look at the girl’s body in the full-length mirror on the back of the bedroom door. Somehow, that feels like a violation. Even if her boobs had felt sort of nice in his—no. _No_. He is not going to think thoughts like that. About her—his?—body. Not when he doesn’t even know what is _happening_.

He makes his way as quickly as he can—dressed, he hopes, marginally reasonably for a girl—out of the tiny apartment and stops short on the outdoor landing. He’s in Coruscant.

And it’s beautiful.

The buildings are tall, their windows are shining in reflection of the sunlight overhead, there are streams of speeders passing by above and below where he’s standing, their humming only making him feel that much more aware of how _weird_ this all is. He’s never been to Coruscant before. His mom had always said that it was too big, too much, that he was too young. But here he is—a girl—and he’s in Coruscant and it’s beautiful and he’s _no one_ he doesn’t matter, he’s not Leia Organa’s son, not Luke Skywalker’s nephew. He’s just Ben. Or…

He looks down at the phone in his hand and scrolls over to the settings. He’s Rey. _Rey_. He wonders who Rey is.

More importantly: he wonders where Rey goes to school, because he has to get there. He’s running late. And he doesn’t want to ruin Rey’s life by doing what Ben does best and just getting close to someone.

How he makes it through the streets of Coruscant, onto the subway, and to Rey’s school, Ben will never fully know. He’s a bit dazed, to say the least—overwhelmed by this place. _She probably can sail right through this town,_ he thinks. He can’t tell if he’s jealous or impressed. Because he definitely doesn’t find it as easy as he’d like, making his way through Coruscant.

 _One day, though._ When he’s done with school and can get away…

He finds Finn—or rather Finn finds him—her—within his first few minutes in the school building.

“There you are,” and an arm thrown around his neck. Is Finn her boyfriend? Is he supposed to kiss him as greeting? But Finn only yawns and says, “Hope Plutt didn’t cause too much trouble.”

“No,” Ben says and once again his voice is too high. But maybe he’ll get used to it. He hopes he’ll get used to it. “Just got a bit turned around.”

Finn frowns. “How can you get lost on the way to school?” But before Ben can think of a believable lie to answer that question with, he sighs and says, “Come on, we have calc,” and the two of them go off to a classroom where Ben, thankfully, already knows the answer because they covered this lesson last week in Takodana. At least he can make Rey look smart when Mr. Teedo calls on her and asks her a gnarly question that Ben is sure is designed to trip her up and make her look stupid in front of the whole class.

After calc, they have history, and after history, they have lunch and he and Finn go up to the roof of the school building. A few students are playing basketball, whooping and laughing as they shoot hoops. Finn takes his lunch out of his backpack and then stares at Ben.

“Did he not give you lunch?” he asks and from the serious tone in his voice, Ben gathers that this would not be the first time that Rey had shown up to school without food.

“I forgot it,” he says unconvincingly.

Finn gives him a sympathetic look. “You don’t have to lie for him, you know.”

“I’m not lying. I forgot it,” Ben says. He gets lunch at school in Takodana. How was he supposed to have known that Rey’s school in Coruscant would be any different?

“Yeah whatever, Jakku,” Finn says, rolling his eyes. He takes a sandwich out of a plastic bag and hands it to Ben. “I’m not gonna watch you starve.”

“Thanks,” Ben mutters. He wonders if Chance and Poe would give him food in a situation like this. Probably not. Doesn’t matter.

Finn is watching him closely, then sighs. “Let’s ditch class and go to a cafe. My treat.”

 _You don’t have to_ is what Ben should say, what his mother would want him to say, what was polite to say. What he ends up saying, though, is very different.

“Cafe?”

❖

Ben’s eyes go wide when he sees the menu. The closest thing they have to a _cafe_ in Takodana is a dispense machine that gives cans of tinny caf for a credit or two. It’s not like this. _Latte_ , Ben reads in delight. _Mochachino._ And that’s before he even gets to the pastry list.

“You’re quivering again,” Finn laughs. “Come on, hurry up and order so we aren’t rushed before you have to go to work.”

“Work?” Ben asks, looking up from the menu.

Finn gives him a look. “What’s gotten into you today?”

“Weird dream,” Ben mutters.

“Did you try one of those death sticks that Brean—”

“What? No.”

“Ok—you were just—I don’t know. You’re not yourself.”

“I’ll be back to myself tomorrow, I promise.” _I hope_ , he does not say. “It’s just a weird dream.”

The caf isn’t a bit tinny. It’s better than the stuff his uncle makes him to wake him up in the morning. Finn even gets him a little rose-flavored cake with a wink, as though he’s supposed to understand some sort of something. He decides to just fake embarrassment and eat the thing.

He waves goodbye to Finn, who takes pity on him and points him in the direction of the restaurant he—Rey—works in, and he makes it there before he needs to, which is a huge relief. He carefully changes into Rey’s work uniform without staring at her body too much and stares at her in the mirror.

She really is very pretty. He tries smiling. It doesn’t reach her eyes—eyes that have dark circles underneath them—because it doesn’t reach his eyes pretty much ever, but she has a nice smile. He wants to see her eyes light up. Which is stupid. Because he doesn’t know her, even if he’s living a day in her life. _When I said I wanted to go to Coruscant and lose myself in the anonymity of it all, this wasn’t what I meant,_ he tells…he’s not sure. The Force, he supposes.

All the same, it’s sort of nice to not be himself for a little while.

Until the moment when he comes crashing back through.

“Excuse me,” one of the guests says, flagging him down. “There’s a toothpick in my dish.” The guest points to it. It’s clearly been inserted there. “I could have choked on it.”

“There’s no toothpicks in Alderaanian restaurants,” Ben says, glad for the first time that night that Rey works in an Alderaanian place.

The guest’s face clouds.

“Then what is it doing there?”

“Looks like you—” Ben begins crossing his arms over his—her, god there are her boobs again—chest but he’s cut off when someone appears at his side.

“What seems to be the problem?”

“There’s a toothpick in my dish,” the guest says to the girl standing next to Ben. She’s shorter than Rey and is looking intently at the guest, ignoring Ben completely.

“I’m so sorry,” the girl says, leaning forward and taking the plate. “We’ll get another one for you.”

“And I hope that you’ll comp the plate for the inconvenience. We have a show to get to,” the guest says.

“Absolutely,” the other woman says.

“Thanks dear. Always so lovely when they know how to be charming, isn’t it?” the guest says to his dinner partner.

“I hope you give her a good tip for being _charming_ when you’re a lying—” Ben begins angrily but the other girl grabs him by the tie and drags him across the dining room.

“You can’t _do_ that, Rey, what’s gotten into you?” she demands.

“He was being a dick,” Ben says loudly. “You can’t let them get away with that.” It’s like his mother has invaded his body or something—her rants about how men think they can get away with everything and just expect women to smile.

“I know, Rey, but it’s customer service. What do you expect?” the girl sighs. Then she gives Rey a smile. “Thanks for sticking up for me, though. It means a lot.”

She pats Rey—Ben—on the shoulder and takes the plate back to the kitchen.

Later, on the train ride home, Ben scrolls through Rey’s phone idly. He hadn’t done that this morning—probably because he’d been so panicked about actually being in Rey’s body. There are photos of her and Finn hanging out after school, and some photos of Rose—the lead hostess who had defended Rey and who Ben had defended right back. _Got a bit of a crush?_ he wonders, looking at the angle and composition of the shots. All of them are surreptitious, all of them are lovely.

So he opens her journal app on her phone and begins to type.

 _I was late to school today. Sorry about that—I know you can’t take more of that this month, but I didn’t exactly know what was going on. Finn was helpful. He’s a good friend. We went to a cafe after school. Also, I defended Rose’s honor with my…_ he pauses, and thinks of what his dad would say, _suave charm. You can thank me later._

He gets into Rey’s pajamas, climbs into bed, and shuts off the lights.

 _WHO ARE YOU???_ He remembers scrawled in his lit notebook. So he fumbles for Rey’s bedside table and finds a pen.

 _Ben,_ he writes on her palm, and then lets sleep take him.


	4. Chapter 3

Her alarm goes off and Rey silences it with a groan.

She had the _weirdest_ dream.

She yawns and open her eyes and something on her palm catches her eye and she stretches it open. _Ben._

What?

She sits bolt upright and grabs her phone. She clicks into her journal app and there’s a note there that she doesn’t remember writing. _Suave charm?_

What the _hell_?

❖

_Who_ _are you what are you why is this happening???_

Ben stares at his arm. It’s the same handwriting as that note in his lit notebook. _I left you my name,_ he thinks, rolling his eyes as he gets to his feet and goes to get dressed.

❖

“Coffee after school?”

“Nah, I have to get to work.”

“Oh so you remember where you work now?” Finn is grinning at her and she blinks at him.

“Why…would I forget where I…”

_Ben._

❖

“I really think your uncle needs to work on his exorcising skills,” Chance laughs while they’re sitting on the bluffs over the lake during lunch.

“Yeah?” Ben grunts.

“Yeah,” Chance says.

“Can we keep the other Ben? He’s nicer,” Poe says, elbowing Ben. Ben glares.

“Certainly made art more interesting yesterday,” Junior laughs.

“Wait—what happened?” Ben looks between them as they tell him about how he apparently told Hux and Phasma to stuff it when they talked about his mother. Only after he had to be reminded of who his mother was.

❖

Rey wakes in Ben’s body to find a note scrawled angrily on her own arm. _Don’t make a scene at school. Things are bad enough as it is without you drawing attention to me._

“You’re welcome,” she mutters in his deep voice. “Sorry for trying to help.”

It had been thrilling—she’d felt brave standing up for his mother like that. It was easier to defend herself when it wasn’t _herself_ she had to defend.

And he’d bragged about _suave charm_ when he’d been flirting with Rose, and now Rose is acting like they’re something and Rey wasn’t even a _part_ of that.

❖

It’s easier to be calmer around Uncle Luke when he has to avoid Unkar Plutt. Somehow his uncle, in all his hypocritical “I’m so good, look at how good I am,” glory is so much easier to stomach when he has to slip out the door than as Rey after having asked for lunch food that wasn’t coming because she’d taken a few fewer shifts at work because she had to study for a math test.

 _I can take it for you,_ Ben had left in a note on her journal app.

 _We can’t plan for it,_ Rey had replied, _And I don’t need your help._

Because it’s true: they can’t plan for it.

They wake up at random in one another’s bodies. They have no idea what causes it, apart from falling asleep. And it makes lessons a complete nightmare. But of course, Ben’s grades have been suffering a lot lately, so it’s not like he cares about that. It matters more to Rey, though.

He sees that much in her journal app. _Get top marks in Calc, Art, Physics, Design, Biology._ Along with a list of landscape architecture programs in the city.

 _She must love Takodana._ It was just about the only good thing about Takodana, how beautiful it was.

❖

Rey starts sketching the town. She’s spent enough time walking around that lake to have it all in her mind’s eye, and it’s always soothing, to draw before bed when she’s done with her homework, to settle her mind down so she doesn’t have trouble going to sleep.

She likes the little mountain town with its lovely lake. She likes Ben’s friends, the way they tell her she’s a good artist, the way they always seem to have something to talk about, the way she doesn’t have to worry about what she’ll be eating when she wakes up in Ben’s body because his uncle gives her breakfast and dinner, and the school provides lunch.

It’s beautiful. The people seem to enjoy their lives, rather than constantly feel the stress of the city. It’s the right balance of empty and full, rather than the two extremes that Rey has known in Jakku and Coruscant.

Ben doesn’t know how lucky he is.

❖

They start communicating through messages in their journal apps—mostly _don’t_ s because, invariably, they’ll find something wrong when they wake up back in their own bodies.

 _Don’t spend all my money on treats!!!!_ Rey screeches at him in text when he wakes up. ( _Our money, you mean. I work for that money too,_ Ben replies angrily.)

 _Don’t be late to school._ What does she even do? Does she just stare at the lake the whole time? Or does she have a lie-in in his bed? Whatever, he can’t handle the demerits and his mother telling him that he needs to do better, it’s not _his_ problem.

_Don’t take showers. I’ll take care of it. And no touching._

_Fine. I don’t touch._

_Don’t even_ look _._

 _Don’t look at_ me _then._

But the one that grinds Rey’s gears the most are when she comes back to work the next day and half of the other servers are glaring at her as Rose sails past, giving her a wink. _Can you cut the suave charm? You don’t even know what you’re doing. Chance says you’ve never had a girlfriend._

 _I’m single because I want to be!_ is all he can think to reply with.

_Yeah? So am I!!! Stop messing around with Rose. And if you want someone to pull the suave charm on, why not at school? I’m pulling all the weight in raising up your social reputation right now._

_Keep your nose out of it. It’s my life._

_Our life. Unless you want to stop using MY MONEY to buy food WE can’t afford._

❖

Ben wakes in his own body with a note in his app:

 _What does your uncle mean when he says that the Force moves in mysterious ways? He keeps saying it. Also I’m trying not to break your holocron, but I have to look like I’m doing_ something _with it or else he gets suspicious._

Ben tabs down a few lines. This is how they communicate when the other leaves a question. Answer under the question, since they don’t know what days they’ll be in the other’s body.

 _He does that. Don’t worry about it too much. It’s…_ It’s…he doesn’t know how to describe it. The idea even of letting his uncle touch the holocron he’s making upsets him, but Rey fiddling around with it. Well, he trusts her with it, oddly. He trusts her. Even if she’s making a bit of a mess of his life, he doesn’t think that she’s trying to actively do damage. If anything, he thinks she’s trying to help.

And yeah, he knows everyone’s trying to help—Poe and Junior, Uncle Luke, even his mom in her way—but Rey doesn’t know him and she wants to help. Or maybe she knows him better than everyone else.

 _It’s fine, I trust you with it. Just don’t break it or anything,_ is what he ends up writing before stretching and getting out of bed and making his way downstairs for breakfast.


	5. Chapter 4

Rey comes out of Ben’s room dressed for school and ready for breakfast to find Luke sitting there with a sardonic smile on his face. “No school today,” he says gently. “Got your days of the week twisted around?”

“A bit,” Rey says gruffly and returns to Ben’s room. She’s never poked through his dresser before. It’s always been school uniform, but she picks a sweatshirt and some dark pants and returns to find Luke still sitting there, drinking his caf.

“I thought we’d go up the mountain today,” Luke says carefully, looking at Ben.

“Ok,” Rey replies.

Luke nods slowly and Rey grabs a muffin and eats it, then takes a few clementines and stuffs them into the sweatshirt’s front pouch for the walk. Then they set off.

Autumn has arrived and it’s never been more lovely. The trees as they make their way up the second ridge around the lake are turning red and yellow and orange, leaves delicately floating through the golden sunlight. Rey tries to memorize the contours of the leaves, the colors of them in sunshine and in shade, the way that the wind makes them rustle and show their duller underside. _I’ll paint it, one day,_ she thinks. Or, when she’s a landscape architect, she’ll design something that tries to capture this for the people who never leave the city, so they can pretend for just a moment that they understand what nature is.

“How are you doing?” Luke asks her.

“I’m fine,” Rey replies. It’s the first time that Luke has asked her this while she’s been Ben. She’s worried she won’t be able to handle the whole conversation. She’s gotten the impression, both from Ben’s annoyed notes in his journal app and from the way that Luke interacts with her when she’s Ben, that Ben’s not close to his uncle.

Ben doesn’t seem close to anyone.

That makes her so sad.

“The mountain’s not too much?” Luke asks her.

“No,” Rey says, trying not to sound confused. It seems like the sort of question that Ben would be able to answer completely.

Luke just nods and seems satisfied with the single syllable. “A whole year,” he says at last. Rey doesn’t reply. Luke goes on. “The Force is a funny thing. The flow of time, of life and spirit, the balance between everything, twisting and tangling. Does it have purpose? Or is everything we experience meaningless?” He glances her way. She doesn’t say anything and Luke gives her a wry smile. “Ben, he wouldn’t want you to beat yourself up. You’ve done that enough.”

 _Who?_ Rey wonders. Instead, she just makes a grunt like the way that Chance and Poe do when they’re teasing Ben.

Luke sighs and pats Ben on the shoulder. “It’s all right,” he says. “It will be all right.”

Why does she get the feeling that it won’t be?

They reach the summit of the mountain in the early evening—Luke has arthritic knees and so he can’t walk as quickly as his nephew—and cross through the basin at the top of the mountain. _An old volcano,_ she wonders at the basin. And in the center of it, there’s an old dead tree with twisting branches that reach up to the clouds overhead. The wind blows. And where had the mist come from?

She crosses her arms over her chest and tugs her fingers into her sleeves.

“Come on,” Luke tells her and they make their way towards the tree. It’s hollow inside, and there are carvings and what looks like a shrine in the middle with a set of old books.

Luke sets a holocron down beneath the books. “Remember this one?” he asks.

Rey just stares at it, hoping that her curiosity will read as memory. It seems to because Luke claps a hand on Ben’s shoulder again and says, “It’s really good. I’d wager it has a good soul imprint from you. You and Han. He’d probably hate that we’re putting it here, but then again, he never set much store by all this to begin with.”

Rey jerks a nod and Luke hands her the screwdriver that she’s used to fiddle with Ben’s holocron before. She crouches down and puts the final screw in place.

“It’ll be there with him—that part of your soul,” Luke says quietly. Then he makes his way towards the entrance to the tree.   Rey gets to her feet and follows him silently out of the shrine, across the basin to the edge by the path and they stare down over the lake. It’s so gloriously beautiful from up here, with the sun setting just over the other ridge nearby, the reds and yellows and oranges fading into a deep, rich violet as the sky overhead melts into a bright darkness and stars begin to twinkle overhead. Twilight is never much of anything in Coruscant because the city lights all turn on to make sure that people can still see. But up here, it’s magical.

“Ben?” Luke says sharply and she looks at him. His blue eyes are appraising, his lips turned down in the slightest of frowns. “You’re dreaming right now, aren’t you?”

❖

Rey wakes in a cold sweat, and there are tears in her eyes. She lifts her fingers to her face and traces them.

The room is dark, but she has blackout curtains and she’s sure that it’s later than she thinks it is—even if her alarm hasn’t gone off yet.

She wraps her arms around her knees.

Something’s gone. Something important.

She can’t remember what.

Why can she never remember?

❖

_You_ _have a date—you can thank me later. You’re going to the art museum with Rose and just because I know you’re nervous, here are some resources for you._

She sees links to several articles—the dos and don’ts of texting girls, first date etiquette for first timers. _He’s making fun of me._

_Wait._

_Date?_

And Rey’s pelting towards her shabby dresser, trying to find _something_ that’s appropriate for a date with Rose. _I’ll kill him,_ she thinks as she throws shirts on before deciding they aren’t good enough. _I’ll kill him. I’ll—I’ll—_

 _By the time you’re done, the comet will be visible in the sky,_ the note from Ben continues as Rey’s running to the subway—late again, always late— _I can’t believe this has been going on for a whole month. Weird. Don’t ruin the romance of the moment by thinking of me while staring at it with Rose._

 _I won’t_ , she thinks darkly as she shoves her way onto a train. They’re always so very crowded. And she’s so far away from the stop by the art museum.

She’ll kill him when she sees him. She’ll kill him dead.

Rose looks—well—she looks great. She always looks great and she gives Rey the brightest smile when she hurries up to her outside the museum. “Almost thought you were ditching me,” Rose says, but before Rey can apologize, Rose cuts her off, “And then I remembered that it’s _Rey_ I’m meeting, and you’re not exactly the most prompt, are you.” She winks. “Come on, let’s go.”

The museum is lovely, but Rey’s throat is dry the whole time and her palms are sweaty. She doesn’t _want_ to be on a date with Rose. Rose is great, and cute, and wonderful. But she hadn’t lied to Ben when she’d said she _wanted_ to be single. That he hadn’t taken no for an answer rankled. Even if he was trying to help.

He was trying to help.

Rey swallowed.

Only Finn had ever really tried helping her. God knows Unkar Plutt wasn’t good for anything.

She stares at Rose and tries to conjure up the half-baked fantasies she’d always had—the _when I have more money,_ or the _when I’m out of school,_ or the _you asked me out, not the other way around,_ but none of them feel the way they used to. Why?

They make their way through the modern art exhibits, through an _Art of the Kamino System_ special exhibit. Rose ducks into a photography exhibit and Rey follows her and stops dead in her tracks.

There—that’s the lake. She’d recognize it anywhere. The view’s from the high school, and if she looks hard enough, she can make out Ben’s house on the other side of the lake, halfway up the bluffs, shaded by trees.

She finds she can’t look away. There are tears in her eyes, but she doesn’t know why. Beauty’s never made her cry before. Maybe because the photographer had taken a black-and-white photo, and half of the beauty of the place was the deep blue of the lake, the colors of the trees, the shadows cast by the trees. But it feels like something’s missing.

When she and Rose leave the museum, Rose glances at her. “You used to have a crush on me, but it’s faded, hasn’t it?” she asks. Rey’s mouth drops open and she blinks for a moment, but the simple fact that she’s not protesting tells her more than she knows how to process. Rose just smiles. “This has been great, and you’re a wonderful girl, but we don’t fit.” Then she holds out a hand. “Friends?”

“Friends,” Rey agrees with relief, shaking Rose’s hand.

“And whoever you _are_ crushing on now—they’re lucky to have you,” Rose says before waving goodbye and heading off towards her train line.

The sun has set and she can’t see the stars overhead because she can never see stars in Coruscant. It’s part of what she likes about Ben’s home.

_By the time you’re done, the comet will be visible in the sky._

She frowns. What comet?

 _And whoever you_ are _crushing on now—they’re lucky to have you._

Her finger slides over her contacts app to find Ben’s contact info ( _Only use in dire circumstances_ One note in her journal app had read). She takes a deep breath and hits call and stares up at the empty sky overhead.

❖

“You coming?” Chance says into the phone.

“No,” Ben grunts.

“Oh come on. Live a little.”

“I just don’t feel like it.”

He feels like crying, mostly.

“It’s once in twelve hundred years, Solo. Come on. Just for a little while.”

He sighs.

Just for a little while, then.

He drags himself out of bed and stares at himself in the mirror. He looks so tired. He feels so tired. He’s so tired of all this.

He shrugs into a jacket and leaves the house without saying goodbye to his uncle. Uncle Luke’s probably already in town, doing whatever it is that Uncle Luke does at times like this.

He makes his way slowly down the bluffs and pauses to look up at the shining tail of the comet overhead.

 _She’s probably out with Rose right now,_ he thinks sadly. _It was stupid. It was all just. Stupid._ But that was Ben, wasn’t it? Stupid to the end?

At least the stars were beautiful. And the comet, too. If she’s half as bold as she is when she’s Ben, she’ll kiss Rose under the light of that comet, and all his good work won’t have gone to waste. _At least I’ll have done something good for someone I care about._

It really is a beautiful—glittering silver stars that shine so differently somehow in the blue bright light of the comet. Its tail is cyan and purple and blue and colors that Rey would love because she loves colors, she makes notes about them in her journal app so she won’t forget what they are. And the comet itself is a silver crown to all that color, bright and perfect.

Ben smiles as he looks at it, imagining the stars in Rey’s eyes as she looks up at it too. And then something breaking away, bright red and hot and angled so very sharply down, down, down—

❖

“The number you are calling is unavailable. The line has been turned off.” Rey rolls her eyes. He’s probably panicked that she’s calling to yell at him about her date with Rose. She sighs.

She’ll ask him about the comet the next time they switch.

Except that is the last time they switch.


	6. Chapter 5

Rey spends a lot of time drawing the lake.

She doesn’t want to lose it from her memory, given that it’s now been a month since she and Ben last switched places. It was so very beautiful, after all, all those colors, all that life—Ben’s life.

She would have thought that not switching bodies with some strange boy all the time would make it easier to focus in class, but it doesn’t. Instead, she’s filled with the lingering question of _why_ it stopped. Just as suddenly and unexpectedly as it had started. He’s just gone. Like he never existed. Except he did. He did, and now he’s gone.

 _Don’t think like that,_ she rounds on herself one day when she’s feeling particularly low. _It’s not like your parents. You have someplace to start._

She does.

She has the lake.

So she starts to look for it—reverse image searching as frequently as she can.   She tries to remember the names of the restaurants and stores she had passed by on the way to school as Ben, but she can’t. She remembers Chance and Poe, but had never known their full names, so she can’t search for them. She can’t even search for more than just _Ben_ or _Luke_ because she’d never gotten their last names too. She’d learned Ben’s mom’s name, from that time people were gossiping about her in art class, but she can’t remember it.

So she resorts to the image searching. That seems the most likely. She’d seen that photograph of the area on her date with Rose so she knows it’s real. This isn’t all just some dumb dream that’s designed to make her flunk out of school and get trapped like a fly in gel-paper in that poverty that had landed her with Plutt to begin with.

She can find it. She can find him. And ask him what he’d meant about that dumb comet anyway. She’d tried searching for that on the holonet too, but there hadn’t been any information about a comet on the day she’d gone out with Rose.

At the end of that first month, she decides to take a train out east. The leaves on the trees, according to the holonet, can mostly be found in the range to the southeast. So that’s where she’s going to go. She puts on her warmest jacket and makes her way to the train station downtown, where she finds Finn standing there with Rose.

“What if it’s a con act,” Finn says at once.

“It’s not a con act,” Rey replies. She’d had to explain _something_ to Finn when he’d found her obsessively trying to find this lakeside town in the library one day.

Finn looks at Rose, who rolls her eyes back at him.

“You’re meeting an online friend, right?” Rose asks her.

“Could be a con act,” Finn says.

“It’s not like that,” Rey says flushing, but Rose’s eyes are too knowing—especially given why she and Rey aren’t going out. “It’s a friend. And I’m just worried about him.”

“Hasn’t he got other people to worry about him?” Finn asks.

“Yeah, but—” but he won’t ask them for help. She knows that. Something’s…something’s like that with Ben. Where he’s too proud, or thinks he deserves his own misery.

“Con act,” Finn repeats.

“We’re just going to make sure you don’t end up in someone’s basement or something.”

Rey can’t help but be grateful.   Even if she notices the way that Finn and Rose share little looks with one another, the way they roll their eyes, the way they seem to think she’s crazy.

“I’m not crazy,” she mutters to herself as she searches for the boy she’d bodyswapped with for about a month without anything more than a drawing of the lake he lived by as a clue.

They ask people along the train routes if they recognize the lake. “And how do you know this lake’s even _real_?” Finn grumbles.

“There was a photo of it at the museum—remember Rose?”

Rose nodded, her gaze cloudy as though she were trying to remember.

“Do we have enough time to make it back to Coruscant today?” Rey asks Finn towards the end of the day as they are sitting around the table at a restaurant. He pulls up timetables on his phone, and already he looks relieved. They aren’t going to be spending the whole weekend out here. She won’t have to worry about making him think of some lie to tell his parents.

“What can I get you?” the little old woman who seems to cover every job at the restaurant asks. She has huge glasses and dark skin and she gazes between them all.

They order, and Rey takes the drawing out and looks at it. Where is it? Where?

“Oh, that’s a lovely drawing,” the woman says as she drops their drinks off.

“Thanks,” Rey says, smiling at her and preparing to ask her questions of everyone who she shows the picture to, but she doesn’t have to.

“I’m so used to seeing the news footage I forgot how beautiful Takodana could be.”

Rey frowns. _Takodana._ And Rose’s face splits into an expression of horror as she grabs the picture. “Takodana?”

“Yeah,” the woman says. “I used to live there. It’s beautiful—”

Rose stares at Rey, then digs out her phone and quickly searches for something on it before turning the screen around. There’s the lake except—except it’s not the lake that Rey remembers, that Rey knows. “It got hit by a comet. Three years ago. Everyone died.”

❖

The lake isn’t a pocket between the mountains anymore—it’s two pockets, overlapping like some deformed snowman because the comet smashed against it.

Rey kneels down in the overgrown sports field outside the Takodana High School, staring down at it. She doesn’t understand. She doesn’t—

Maz—that’s the name of the woman who owned the restaurant, Maz—places a hand on her shoulder. “I know,” she says quietly. “It’s hard stuff, isn’t it?”

Rey gulps.

_What happened to Ben?_

Ben had stopped switching with her.   That can’t have meant—that can’t mean—

She pulls out her phone and opens the journal app for the first time in a long time, scrolls back over a month to find Ben’s last entry.

The letters glitch into nothingness before her eyes.

Like he’s gone.

No—like he never existed.

❖

She remembers seeing the comet. It was the only time that stars were visible in Coruscant. She remembers seeing the bright blue tail of it, the way that the red heart of the nucleus had spun away. She even remembers hearing something about devastation and horror, a town destroyed, no survivors, but that had been during a week when Unkar hadn’t been feeding her so she hadn’t paid attention to it. There could be beauty in horror, she supposed. She wanted to remember the light of the Erso-Krennic Comet overhead.

❖

_I_ _recognized the scenery because of the news a few years ago. His name—what was it?_

They find the yearbook for the Takodana High School in the library, and Rey shuffles through it. And that’s when she sees them, sitting at a lunch table in a candid picture. That’s Chance and Poe and Ben. He’s smiling. They’re all laughing about something. From the class pictures, it says that it’s his second year of high school. His skin’s a bit bad from hormones but he’s smiling, he’s alive.

Rey grabs the obituary from the paper—the one that lists the names of everyone who died. _Lando Calrissian, Tenda Calrissian, Lando “Chance” Calrissian Jr.._ She gulps. _Poe Dameron._ And then, further down, _Leia Organa. Luke Skywalker. Ben Solo._

And the tears start to well again.

“It has to be a mistake,” she hears Finn say gently. “He died three years ago. How can you have been talking to him?”

❖

“What’s that?” Rose asks her. They’re having dinner. They aren’t going back to Coruscant that night—they missed the last train when Maz took them out to Takodana.

“This?” Rey asks. She stares at it. It’s a bracelet from a weird interaction on a train a few years ago. “It’s a—”

A holocron.

Ben’s holocron.

How hadn’t she recognized it? She’d worked on it with his Uncle Luke, had done what she could not to mess it up while working on it.

“It’s—something I got a few years…” she frowns and stares at it. “A few years ago. Some guy on the train…” Why can’t she remember? Why can’t she ever remember?

She presses her fingers over the smooth metal casing that she knows contains a memory crystal. A memory of Ben. Why is Ben a memory? He would have always been a memory. And yet—

Something doesn’t fit. Something’s not right. She doesn’t understand it.

They go to bed, but Rey doesn’t sleep. She stares at the ceiling overhead, running her fingers over the holocron. Aren’t they supposed to contain a memory? Contain knowledge? What was it Luke had said?

_You’re dreaming now, aren’t you?_

_Rey. Rey? You don’t remember me?_

She hadn’t realized she’d been asleep until she sat bolt upright.

She has to go.

She has to get to that shrine.

She has to—something happened, she’s involved somehow, and she refuses— _refuses_ to believe that Ben Solo is dead.


	7. Chapter 6

Rey is silent the whole drive back to Takodana. She doesn’t have anything to say. Her mind keeps swirling like the early-morning mist outside the car. Maz seems to understand, though. She doesn’t turn on the radio for white noise, and doesn’t try to chit-chat. Rey wonders if she’s remembering what she lost in Takodana, if she’s lost in confused memories of her own.

“Thank you,” Rey says when she gets out of the car, “For everything.”

Maz hands her a paper bag full of food. “Here, take this with you. You’ll need it.”

“Oh, I—”

“Take it,” Maz insists. “That drawing was lovely.”

Rey gulps and takes the bag and waves farewell as Maz drives off back down the twisting mountain road.

It starts to rain as she climbs the mountain and Rey tugs the hood of her sweatshirt up over her head. She moves faster today than she did when she was Ben, despite Ben having longer legs than her. Luke moved slowly because of his arthritic knees, but without having an elderly uncle to care for, Rey can move as quickly as one who has to navigate Coruscant crowds needs to.

Unfortunately, that means she’s out of breath soon. The mountain is steep, and she’s not used to the way the air cuts sharp through her lungs, despite the rain to soften it. Maybe Luke had the right of it and moved slowly because that was the way to do it, and not because he had to. It seemed like a thing he’d do. _Balance_ , she thought with a sad smile.

Luke Skywalker had died three years ago as well.

It takes her most of the day to make it up the mountain, after that. She moves more slowly, taking in the way the rain plop plop plops off the dying leaves of the trees around her. They are more brown today than red and yellow and orange, and most of them have fallen around her. The rain takes away the ones that had clung to the trees the higher up she goes, and Rey has to move carefully because between the muddy road and the leaves, everything is very slippery. She stops under a rocky outcropping to eat the food that Maz had given her and almost immediately feels better about everything. She feels braver, with food in her stomach. Maybe that’s why she’d always felt braver when she’d switched into Ben. She wasn’t hungry.

At the summit of the mountain, she stops, because there it is—the old twisted tree. The rain has started to slow, but the air is just as misty up here as it had been that day with Luke. _Clouds, maybe,_ she wonders as she makes her way down into the basin. _It wasn’t a dream._

_You’re dreaming right now, aren’t you?_

She makes her way into the old shrine and there is the holocron that she and Luke had put down. It’s covered with dust and dirt and looks like it’s been sitting there for years, rather than months. _It’ll be there with him—that part of your soul._

_Our timelines weren’t in sync. That was the problem. That was what was wrong._

Rey doesn’t know much about holocrons. In that note that Ben had left her the one time she’d asked, he hadn’t given her more details—probably didn’t have time before or after school, whenever he’d seen it. But she’s fairly certain that if she didn’t make the holocron—and she hadn’t made this one, Ben had—that she’s not supposed to touch it.

Which is why she’s sure she has to. Because part of Ben’s soul is in there, and he wasn’t supposed to have died, she still can’t believe that he had.

Rey presses her hand against the crystalline surface of the thing and it began to glow, casting starlike shapes on the walls of the shrine through the metalwork decorations. Rey stands up to get a better look at the light and some of it splays across her chest. She takes a step back, not wanting to block the light from reaching the surface of the cave and stumbles back, falls over, her head striking the hardened dirt beneath her feet…

The lights overhead change. They aren’t stars anymore.

She sees a world there. Or a world between worlds.

_Rey has taken Biology. She recognizes what mitosis. The splitting of cells, the expansion of tiny organisms into one tiny organism—a squalling baby, lying in the arms of his mother, still covered in blood that a nurse tries to wipe away. The woman swats at the nurse, though, her eyes on the child._

_“Hello, Ben,” she murmurs, kissing his bloody forehead. “Hello sweetheart.”_

_The scene morphs. Ben is older and he is running around the house with a toy speeder in hand. “Kid, be careful!” calls a voice Rey’s never heard before. A man’s voice, and the man in question comes into view, leaning to one side around a door._

_“Zoom zoom!” the boy shouts. “I’m gonna be a pilot, just like you, daddy!”_

_“Sure are, kid,” the man replies, “but don’t break anything or then we’ll both be in trouble with your mom.”_

_The boy pelts towards his dad and hugs him around the waist and the scene melts and morphs again. Luke is sitting there now, meditating. Ben, a little older, sits beside him. “When will I know I’m meditating?” Ben asks._

_“You won’t,” Luke replies._

_“So how will I know—”_

_“Quiet, Ben. You certainly won’t know if you can’t feel it out.”_

_Ben huffs and the scene morphs again. It’s three of them at the kitchen table now, Ben, his dad, and Luke. There’s a fourth setting. “I knew we shouldn’t have let her run,” Ben’s dad grumbles. “So much for family.”_

_“It’s important work,” Luke says calmly. “She’ll be here when we need her.”_

_Ben gets older. He plays_ _basketball_ _with his friends dressed in a school uniform. His dad’s always at his games; his mother never is._

_There’s a fight—Ben shouting at his mother that she doesn’t care. “I do, sweetheart,” she reaches for him but he’s already pelting out of the room._

_“You can’t say stuff like that to your mom,” his dad intones._

_“Why not? It’s the truth. She’s not there anymore. She_ lied _.”_

_“She’s busy.”_

_“Uncle Luke says busy is a state of mind. That no one’s ever really busy, they just choose to do what they choose to do.”_

_“Your uncle’s full of mumbo jumbo teachings. If your mom didn’t care, trust me, I’d know.”_

_“Trust me, I’d know,” Ben mimics angrily._

_They’re climbing the mountain. The leaves are red and gold and the sunshine is bright._

_“Don’t be like that,” his dad says but it’s as though his voice is from far away and Ben turns around, lashes out, shoves him and his father stumbles back, falls back, over the ledge, falling falling falling as Ben screams and screams and calls to him, pelting down the ledge after him but it’s too late._

_“It’s all right sweetheart,” his mother says, holding his hand, but her voice sounds empty._

_“It’s not your fault,” Uncle Luke tells him._

_But it is._

_Ben quits the basketball team. Ben stops initiating plans with his friends. He keeps to himself—or as much as he can with Chance and Poe always at his heels._

_He goes to class. “He’s not even trying anymore,” one of his teachers says. “Of course not,” another replies. “He killed his father.” They don’t realize he can hear them until he throws his fist into a wall._

_His mother is running for reelection. “I promise I’ll be more present when the election is over. I promise, sweetheart.” But he doesn’t believe her. He only ever sort of believed dad when he said that she still cared._

_She shouldn’t care. It’s better that she doesn’t, if he’s a monster._

_He rounds the lake, the comet is high in the sky and Rey can’t help it, Rey starts to yell. “Ben! Ben please! Please!”_

_The comet gets brighter, closer, more colorful by the second._

_The nucleus splits, bright burning red from cold hot blue, getting closer and closer and Rey yells and throws her hands up over her eyes._

Everything goes still.

The light around her settles.

She hears birds chirping, hears a breeze outside.

When she moves her hands, she finds that she’s in Ben’s room. In Ben’s body.

Rey wraps his arms around himself, hugging him closely, sobbing. “You’re not dead,” she blubbers, sniffing snot back into her nose. “You’re not gone.”

Which means one thing: she has time. She can save them all, now that she’s got time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [World Between Worlds](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/World_between_worlds)


	8. Chapter 7

“The Erso-Krennic comet will be at its zenith tonight, and people around the world—” the newscaster on the television is saying but Rey doesn’t care. She only cares that that means there’s time. She doesn’t care how excited people around the world are at a chance to see this once-in-a-lifetime comet.

“Morning,” Luke yawns as he comes into the kitchen. Then, with a sardonic smile, “You’re up early.” Then, just as he had on the top of the mountain the last time that Rey had seen him, his gaze gets sharp. “You’re not Ben, are you?”

Rey gulps as she looks at him. But he doesn’t seem angry. Instead, he pats the seat next to him and she comes and sits down. “That happened to me too, when I was younger. Me and Leia. We used to switch bodies. I haven’t thought about that in a long time. I’d…” he frowns. “I’d forgotten, actually.”

“You switched with your sister?” Rey asks quietly.

“Didn’t know she was my sister,” Luke replies. “We didn’t do the testing until much later. We’d found each other again after it had…” his voice trails away again, before he looks up at her, understanding flickering in those blue eyes. “After it had stopped.” He keeps watching her. Then, “Something bad’s going to happen, isn’t it?”

So Rey tells him. She tells him everything—about switching with Ben, about how the switching just stopped, about how she had come back to Takodana and it had been destroyed by the comet. She tells him about finding all the names in the list of victims, she tells him about coming back to Takodana, about climbing the mountain, about touching the holocron and waking up in Ben’s body once again.

She stares at him, waiting for him to call Ben crazy, waiting for him to say that that’s one hell of a story. Instead, he says, “Nobody’s going to believe that” which is a surprisingly mundane reply. It’s calming, and relief floods Rey as she looks at Ben’s old uncle.

She gets to her feet.

It’s time to get to work.

❖

“We need to bomb the power plant,” she tells Chance and Poe during lunch. They’re in the broadcast club room, and both Chance and Poe look at her like she’s crazy.

She can’t really blame them for it.

“Look,” she begins, “The comet’s going to split. I just _told_ you the comet’s going to split.”

“Yeah,” Chance laughs, “But there’s a difference between _the comet’s going to split_ and wanting to bomb the power plant.”

“We should do it,” Poe says at once.

“You’ve lost it, too,” Chance mutters.

“Yeah, and you know how the lake was formed?” Poe demands. “Or was I the only person paying attention in earth sciences?” Poe looks around at them significantly. “The Takodana Lake was formed by a comet hitting the earth a thousand years ago. For all we know, it’s the Erso-Krennic comet.”

“Yeah, but _bombing the power plant,_ ” Chance says. “A little extreme. Look just because some girl rejected you in Coruscant doesn’t mean that we just bomb the power plant. Can’t we try—I don’t know—talking to your mom the mayor?”

Rey takes a deep breath.

Of all the times she’s switched into Ben’s body, she’s never once spoken with Leia Organa.

“We can try,” she says at last. She doesn’t know what she could say to Leia Organa. “But—if it doesn’t work, you,” she points to Poe. “Help me blow it up and you,” she points to Chance, “use that broadcasting club charisma to help get people to the high school. That’s out of the range of the strike.”

❖

She does her part. She stops by Leia’s office. She waits just outside the door for Ben’s mother to see her only son. It takes five minutes for the door to open.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart, I was on a call,” Leia says. Then she sees Ben’s face. “What’s wrong?”

“The comet’s going to split tonight,” Rey tells her, pushing past Leia into the office to close the door. She doesn’t want Leia’s secretary to overhear and think she’s crazy. “And the split’s going to hit Takodana. We need to evacuate. We need to get everyone over to the high school, or out of town, or else we’re all going to die.”

Leia’s face is oddly blank as she stares at Rey for a moment. Then her gaze gets shrewd, appraising, as she looks her son up and down. At last, she sighs.

“Ben,” she murmurs, reaching her hand out to Rey. “Sweetheart, I know I haven’t been around—”

“This isn’t about that,” Rey snaps, cutting her off.

“Isn’t it? The comet? Splitting. Ben, how can you know that?”

“I just do,” Rey says. “Mom—everyone’s going to die.”

“I know I haven’t been around as much as I said,” Leia repeats, “And I know I can’t fill the hole your father left, but—”

“I knew you wouldn’t be helpful,” Rey snaps. “You’re never helpful.” And she turns to the door and grabs it before her mother says, “Wait.”

And her voice is different, a little sharp.

Leia’s eyes are a different color and shape than Luke’s. They’re like Ben’s eyes. But her expression is that same sharp expression that Luke had had that morning over breakfast, that twilight up on the mountain. “Ben? You’re not—You’re not my son.”

Rey can’t tell if that makes it better or worse—that the one time his mother seemed to know him was when he wasn’t even in his own body.

“Please,” Rey begs her, but Leia just shakes her head.

So Rey turns on her heels and runs, because she doesn’t have any more time to waste.

❖

“Please,” Rey begs passing strangers on the street. “Please, don’t go to the festival. The comet’s going to hit the lake. Go to the school, it’s safe there, please.”

“He’s lost it,” she hears someone say loudly behind it. “Murderous, crazy kid.”

“I’m trying to save you!” she screams after whoever it was who said it. She wants to cry. Would Ben have been able to convince them, would he have known what to say? She wants to think he would. She wants to think that he’d keep it together a little better than she can. Except maybe he couldn’t. She’ll never know.

“Ben,” and it’s Poe standing behind him, grabbing his arm. “You can’t do it that way. Come on.”

“What did your mom say?” Chance asks from his bike.

“She’s no help,” Rey moans. She turns to both of Ben’s friends. His only friends. Who probably think he’s crazy too, but she can’t worry about that right now. “You know what to do?”

Poe and Chance share a look. Then Junior takes a deep breath. “Listen, Ben,” he says. “We’ve been talking. Are you sure this isn’t about—”

“This _isn’t_ about my dad!” Rey chokes out and there are tears in her eyes again.

“—that girl in Coruscant.”

She freezes. She stares at Junior and he takes a step back, so intense is her gaze.

“What girl?”

“The girl. The one you went to see over the weekend.”

“I…”

The wind blows across the lake, swirling up through the trees, up to the mountain top.

 _Are you there?_ she wonders.

“I need your bike,” she says to Chance.

“What?”

“I need to—”

“Ben!”

And she’s on the bike, going as fast as she can up the mountain.

“Just get them to the high school!” she shouts over her shoulder to them.

Why had Ben gone to Coruscant? _Why?_ He had never been to Coruscant before, didn’t know anyone there.

Anyone except her.

❖

Ben jolts awake.

It’s raining outside and it takes him a moment to get his bearings.

He’s lying in the dirt in the old shrine on top of the mountain. How’d he get up here? The back of his head hurts and his mouth feels all grimy like he’s been unconscious for a while. He rubs his head.

His hands are small.

Rey?

He grabs at his chest and yep—there they are, her boobs. He releases them immediately. She’d been explicit about how he wasn’t supposed to touch them.

Slowly he gets to his feet. There’s a holocron under the old books, and he looks around to see if Rey had brought anything with her. She hadn’t. Her pockets contain a wallet and a pen and a piece of paper. He takes it out, but it’s too dark to really see what’s on it, so he makes his way out of the shrine and in the dull light of the misty rainy day, he sees a drawing of the lake. A good one. She’s always been good at art. He always got praise for the things he made in art class on the days that Rey had switched into his body.

He tucks the drawing away into her pocket again and makes his way across the basin. His head is still hurting a bit, and she’ll probably need to get back to Coruscant. Does she have work today? Is she missing school? He pulls out her phone and looks at the journal app, but it’s empty for today.

 _Did she come to look for me?_ He wonders. _Did she come to apologize for the other day?_ If she had, why was she here and not down at the school, or at his house. She knows where they are by now—where he’d be.

❖

_Ben_ _gets on a train to Coruscant, his hands so jittery he doesn’t know what to do with them. Should he shove them into his pockets, should he cross them over his chest, should he write or draw or something? Instead, his fingers trace the tiny holocron he’s wearing like a charm on his wrist. He’d finished it the night before, trying not to think about Rey on her date with Rose._

She might not like you visiting, _a voice in his head tells him._ You should at least try calling her first.

_So he digs his phone out of his pocket and scrolls to Rey’s contact info. She’ll probably be mad at him about that date. But he’d meant well with it. And besides, he can make it up to her. He can take her out to coffee, or something._

_“The number you are calling is unavailable. The line has been turned off.”_

_Ok. That’s fine. He can deal with that. He’ll find her and it’ll all be ok. And even if, for some reason, he can’t recognize her because she looks different through his eyes than she does through her own, he’ll still know her. How can he not? She’s been inside him, and he’s been inside her. He’ll know her when he sees her._

_He uses Rey’s life to navigate the hustle and bustle of the city. His mother never wanted him to come here. She says it’s an evil place, an overwhelming place, but it can’t be that bad if Rey’s here. It had always been like a dream because he knows Rey’s here._

_And suddenly she’s there, on the subway that’s pulling into the station. She’s got headphones in and is staring off into the distance. He pushes onto the car to stand in front of her, feeling himself smiling as he looks down at her. She’ll jump out of her skin when she realizes who’s standing right in front of her. She’ll start yelling at him, or maybe crying, or at least smile._

_But she doesn’t do any of those things. She glances his way and scoots back to make room for him before going back to her music._

_“Hey,” he says, but his voice is clogged. Why doesn’t she acknowledge him? Is she that mad at him?_

_“Huh?” she asks looking up at him again. Then she frowns. “Do I know you?”_

_Ben lets out an incredulous laugh but Rey’s eyes only narrow. Mistrusting. Because he’s a stranger. She doesn’t recognize him._

_He deflates._

_“Never mind,” he mutters, not bothering to try and keep the upset out of his voice._

_He makes to get off the train at the next stop._

_“Wait?” Rey calls and he freezes and looks back at him. “What’s your name?”_

_Ben_   _slides the holocron bracelet off his wrist and drops it in her hand. She looks down at it, confused. She doesn’t recognize it._

_By the time she looks up again, he’s gone._

❖

Ben reaches the crest of the basin and freezes.

Below him isn’t Takodana—it can’t be Takodana. Not with two bulbs in the lake like that, not with the water twinkling up like a diamond at him but buildings that have been torn apart lining the edge of—it can’t be.

He pulls Rey’s drawing out of his pocket again, his hands shaking. That—that’s the Takodana he had known. Not this. Not this. It had been beautiful, pristine, everyone happy and excited for the comet and the festival. And Ben had been lower than he’d been in a while, but he was going to at least go to the festival because Chance was making him. He’d looked up at the comet and it had been the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen apart from Rey and then—oh god—and then—

He falls to his knees and can’t breathe.

_Did I die?_

_Then how am I—_

Something shines on his wrist from under the sweatshirt. He tugs at it.

It’s the holocron bracelet he’d given her on the train the other day. She hadn’t just thrown it out. She’d kept it. She’d come here to see if he was still alive, hadn’t she?

“Rey!” he shouts into the setting sun.

And he thinks he might just hear, whispering across the wind, a reply of “Ben!”


	9. Chapter 8

 

Rey thinks she hears it, echoing in the semidarkness of the sunset and impending twilight, echoing through the vend at the top of the mountain. “Rey!”

“Ben!”

“Rey!”

“Ben!”

But there’s no one there. As far as she can see, it’s just her as she runs along the ridge, calling his name, hearing him calling for her right back. She can hear him, but doesn’t know that he’s running along the ridge as well, running towards her, calling for her as though his life depends on it. She can hear that in his voice. He can hear it in his own voice.

“Ben!”

“Rey!”

And a shiver goes up their spines. They both freeze. They turn. Rey reaches out a hand, and Ben does too. She reaches for him, but her fingers move through air as the sun sets behind them, stars streaking through the red and orange and blue and day and night. Light and dark. And they can see one another. They are themselves again.

“Ben!” Rey chokes out and her eyes well with tears. She can’t believe it—that he’s here, that he’s alive. He’s been dead for three years, but he’s here. She’d just been inside him. Had she saved him? Was it enough?

“Rey,” he breathes. She knows him this time. She recognizes him and there are tears in her eyes and she’d worn the holocron bracelet that she’d stared at so confusedly on the train the day before. Had it been the day before? “What happened?”

“Why did you come to Coruscant?” she asks him.

His face heats. “I wanted to see you.”

“Yeah, well you came too early,” she said. “I didn’t know you.” She runs her hands over the holocron. “You came years too early. We’re out of time.”

“We’re not,” he replies fiercely. He refuses to believe that.

“No—” she interrupts, seeing where he’d not understood and needing to correct the misunderstanding.   “No, I meant—that was three years ago,” she said. “You’re three years ago for me. We’re out of time, not in the same time stream. The Force—”

“The Force?” Ben asks sharply, fully aware that she’s about to spew something his uncle would have told her at some point. Why else would she have been in that shrine?

“The ebb and flow of time,” is all she says. “Ben, there isn’t time. You’re going to die—we have to fix it. I can’t lose you again.”

He looks out over the lake. It looks like diamonds are glittering on the surface, though whether remnant light from the sun or light from the stars overhead, coming forth now that it’s twilight, he can’t quite tell.

“How?” he asks her.

So she tells him about the plan, about how Chance and Poe are in on it. “You can do it,” she tells him and she reaches for him. “You’re not alone.”

His eyes get bright and he doesn’t take her hand, he pulls her into his arms. “Neither are you,” he tells her. “I’m not going to leave you alone. I’m going to do it.”

They both are crying now. They both need to cry. They are young, and afraid, and have found one another. What could be more terrifying, than losing the other to the cruelties of time and fate?

When he lets her go, they both rub their eyes. Then Rey gives him a sharp look. “Why’d you do that? Set me up with Rose?”

“I thought you liked her,” he replies anxiously, nervously.

“I did,” Rey says and her voice cracks and she flushes. She looks away from Ben, down into the valley with the sobering lake. The comet is overhead, blue and pink and purple and silver and bright.

Her hands go to the bracelet and she unfastens it and hands it back to him. “For luck,” she tells him when he gives her a confused, hurt look. “You need it more than me. As much of your soul as you can get.”

He takes it from her and for a moment, the little device—so small, so delicate compared to the one in the shrine—glints in the not-light not-dark of the violet sky around them.

“I’ll find you when it’s done,” he tells her. “I will. Even if I have to wait three years, I will find you.”

Rey nods and then a memory tickles at her. “Here,” she says, digging her pen out of her pocket. “Your uncle said his memories faded even though he switched when he was younger. We should write down one another’s names, so we don’t forget when we wake up.”

Ben extends his palm to her and she begins to write. Then she hands him the pen and he takes it and the moment the felt tip of it touches her skin, the pen falls to the ground.

She stares at it, lying there for just a moment, trying to understand why he had dropped it. Except that when she looks up he’s gone.

Silence. It’s more night than twilight now.

“Wherever you are in the world,” she tells him, “I’ll find you. I’ll start looking right now.”

She bends down to pick up the pen, muttering “Ben, Ben, Ben” like a prayer before digging the picture of the Takodana lake out of her pocket again and turns it over on the back. But as she presses the tip of the pen to the paper—what was his name? It’s right there, on the tip of her tongue. She knows it. She _knows_ it. _I remember everything—who are you? What’s your name?_

She starts to cry.

_Why did I come here? What am I doing here? I came to see him, to save him, I wanted him to live. Someone dear to me, someone I shouldn’t forget. What’s his name?_

“Come back!” she calls out to a ghost, not for the first time in her life, and the tears are truly streaming now because she’s alone. She’s lost something. It’s not coming back for her. She doesn’t even know what it is. Why is it that she can never remember—why is it that they always leave her in the end?

❖

“Rey. Rey. Rey.”   It’s how he exhales as he sprints down the mountain, the comet hanging in the sky overhead—a beautiful death. “Rey. Rey. I’ll find you. I’m going to live and find you again.” His throat gets dry, and he stops saying her name for a moment to try and swallow some saliva down, to moisten his throat again.

Tears well in his eyes. _I can’t remember her name._

_Who are you? Who are you?_

“Go to the high school!” he bellows at the people he passes as he reaches the base of the mountain. “Get to safety!”

The broadcast is silent, though. Junior either hadn’t done it or had been caught. In the distance, he can see smoke rising from the power plant. _Caught, then._

“Go to the high school!” he screams. _What was your name? What was it?_

He reaches for it, a memory of something that’s not quite there.   All he can remember are the vivid blues and purples, that gold-tinted twilight. Her face is fading into the night. And her name—what was her name?

He’s running as fast as he can, faster than he’d run since he’d been on the basketball team. He’s going as quickly as he can, panic in his heart. He needs to get to the high school or else he’s going to die. But they all need to go too. Or else they’ll all die. He needs to live. She came back for him so that he’d live. What was her name?

And he loses his footing on the ground and he’s falling, rolling down the hilly road until he’s stopped.

_We should write down one another’s names, so we don’t forget when we wake up._

Overhead, he can see the comet. Somewhere in her time, in her world, she’s probably looking up at it too. She’ll think it’s beautiful. She’ll love the colors of it.

He drags his hand up in front of his face and stares at it for a moment.

 _I love you,_ he sees written there and he starts to cry, great wracking sobs, the likes of which he has not cried since his father died.

“That’s not going to help me remember your name, though,” he sobs.

_I’ll find you when it’s done. I will. Even if I have to wait three years, I will find you._

He has to get up. He has to. He is not going to die like this. He has to find her. He has to remember her name.

He rubs his head. It’s stinging, a pain twin to hers, wherever she is, whenever she is, and he starts to run again.

But his feet don’t take him to the high school. They take him to city hall, where he bursts into his mother’s office.

“Ben!” his mother’s there. And so is his uncle.

“We’re all going to die!” he yells. “We’re all going to die and it’s all going to be for nothing. The comet’s going to split and we’re all going to die!”

His mom takes a deep breath before freezing. “You’re you again.”

“What?”

She turns and looks out the window. “Oh my god—Luke, look!”

Because the heart of the comet is splitting—one blue, one red, burning so very hot.

 _What was your name?_ is all Ben can think as he stares at it, as his mother rounds her desk and calls the notification center and demands that everyone get to the high school _right now_.

_Y_ _ou saved me. Saved us all._

_What’s your name?_

He clings to the memory of her, but the harder he clings, the less he remembers. The shape of her face, the sound of her voice, the feeling of her warm in his arms—they all fade as he and his uncle and his mother run for their lives.


	10. Chapter 9

Rey gets on the train. It’s crowded, she doesn’t get a seat. She never gets a seat, but that’s what happens when you choose to live in the center of things. She can afford to. She has money. Money that’s all hers and not Plutt’s.

She looks down at her watch. She is on time today, for once. That’s good, because she has a client meeting at nine thirty and she wants time to get settled if she can help it. This client is annoying and doesn’t trust her about trees that have brilliant foliage in the autumn.

She stares listlessly out through the window, watching the faces of the people who are in train cars opposite her. Sometimes, she catches herself looking for someone in particular. That’s stupid though. She doesn’t even know who she is looking for.

❖

Sometimes, she wakes up crying. She doesn’t know why. It’s like she had a dream, but she can never recall the contents of the dream.

It feels like she lost something, or someone. Something big. Important. But she can’t remember what.

It’s different from her parents. It’s not like that. She knows what that feels like. She can identify that one. She’s lived with it for so long. Longer than she’s known anything else. This sort of dream started in high school, and never faded. This feels open; that feels closed.

❖

 _Caf_ _?_ The text comes through to her group thread with Finn and Rose. She’s still proud of having gotten them together in high school. They’re getting married in the fall, and Rey helped find the perfect park with the perfect fall foliage for them to do it in.

Finn can’t make it—he has work—but Rey and Rose chat and laugh as they walk through the streets.

“Didn’t we go there once?” Rose asks, nodding up to the news screen. _Eight years since comet struck Takodana_ and the lake with two bulges on it.

“Yeah,” Rey says slowly, dusting off the memory. “Yeah, I was randomly obsessed with it for a few days. Something about the story—a whole town getting destroyed but no one dying…” She can’t even remember why it caught her memory, but then again, it’s been years. Things she’d thought she’d never forget have faded with time because that’s just how life goes, and there’s so much about her high school years that Rey wants to forget. She’s happier now. She has a job, and friends, and independence.

Even if sometimes she feels like she lost something and she can’t remember why. She hadn’t even ever known anyone who lived in Takodana. But she stares up at the screen, showing pictures from the newscast, and her heart aches. Why? The town doesn’t exist anymore. Why does it feel as though she lost her home when that comet struck?

❖

“Oh come on, Poe, he’s just gonna be as much a surly bastard as ever.” She hears it in a cafe, and turns around because _she knows that voice_ but she can’t tell who was talking. She sees the door close and two men walking away, each holding paper cups full of caf, going about their lives.

❖

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees a twinkle at a man’s wrist. It’s the middle of winter, and snow is falling from the sky like stars. She turns to look at it. Her wrist used to twinkle like that, before she’d lost her bracelet.

But she turns back to her own route and doesn’t see him turn too.

❖

And then, one day, as she’s looking out of the train window, she sees a face in the train car across the platform.

She doesn’t recognize the face—long, with big dark eyes—but she knows it, somehow. He’s been inside her—she knows it, knows him. And she sees the way his eyes go wide and he leans forward staring at her so intently and she knows he feels it too.

Rey starts to cry, it feels like her heart is breaking into a million pieces when his train pulls off in the opposite direction from hers and she doesn’t know why.

❖

Ben can’t breathe. He can’t breathe but he doesn’t know why—or rather, he does know why.

He’s just seen a face, her face, someone’s face, she matters—but he doesn’t know why.

He doesn’t care if he’s late to work, work can wait. He tears off the train at the next stop and finds himself running back in the direction of the previous train stop. He has to try and find her. She had seen him first, had recognized whatever this was first. Surely she’ll be getting off the train and running too, won’t she? His heart tells him that. He feels the truth of it, understands it down in his soul—the same way he had known that comet was going to strike Takodana and kill everyone. That’s what it feels like right now—some greater purpose, some force that’s pushing him forward, trying to balance it out, because every action has an equal opposite reaction he’d learned that in physics, had learned that time and truth didn’t always make sense from his uncle.

He runs until he’s out of breath the way he was when he’d run down that mountain, stopping short when he sees her at the top of a set of steps, looking like she’d been running too.

He straightens up and makes his way up the steps, watching her without watching her, knowing that she’s doing the same.

And then they pass one another and nothing has stopped them. They could just keep on going like this forever, and the thought of that is intolerable to him. He feels like his heart is breaking and he doesn’t know why.

_This is stupid. I was braver when I was in high school._

And so he turns.

“Hey!” he calls down to her and she freezes. “Haven’t we met?”

When she looks up at him, there are tears in her bright hazel eyes and he takes a step towards her. He wants to brush those tears away. _It’s all right now, I’ve found you. Just like I said I would._

“I thought so too,” she says and she climbs a few steps towards him.

“I’m Ben,” he says quietly through the lump in his throat. “And your name is…?”

But he knows the answer before she says it. Because it’s always been there, down in his heart, down in his soul, locked away safely for this moment and he says, “Rey,” at the same time she does as her hand finds his and it feels like he can breathe again for the first time in years.

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you enjoy! I'm in [pillowfort](http://pillowfort.io/crossingwinter) and [twitter](https://twitter.com/crossing_winter).


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